Freaks, Geeks, and Glee: Highschool and Groupthink

I recently began watching Glee after reading several positive articles. I was intrigued by the possibility of a show which could channel the genre-bending of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the high school social critique of Freaks and Geeks. I made it to episode 3 before I had to stop. The show certainly has a lot going for it: some well executed melodrama, talented performers, and well executed musical numbers (even though they aren't really my thing, its easy to see that, for what they are, they're extremely well done). Glee, though, is not without its faults, and it isn't the hammy acting or the forced heavy handed messages that turned me off. It's the way that the show fails to really respect the fringes of society in the way that numerous other TV shows and movies have in the past.


High School, in real life as well as television and the movies, is a shallow version of society. What we see in shows like Glee cannot help but be interpreted as a commentary on not just high school but on society as well. The show, on the surface, seems to be an attempt to respect the social outcasts and misfits that make up most of its cast of characters but, while it makes concessions to their individuality, the show seems bent on conformity. I don't mean to say that the characters are being turned into the mindless jock zombies that generally represent "conformity". Instead what is happening is much more subtle, and thus insidious. Each character is asked to take what makes them unique and use it to change the school's perceptions. The message is that individuality has value only in how it affects society. There is a contradiction buried in there. After all, how can the fact of an individual have value if it is only that which society places on it. Its a roundabout way of saying that other people determine our value even if they don't always recognize it right away.


It isn't hard to see this in the show. After all, its plot revolves around a group of misfits trying to win first funding, then school recognition, then regional awards, then national awards,... until there is nothing left but this search for what others can give us. This isn't some rant against awards or competition (if I was Woody Allen, I would show up to the Oscars) but a show like Glee has an extraordinary ability to influence the impressionable. The show is aimed at teenagers after all we have to expect something from it. I'm not an anarchist or a communist either, and I'm not saying that society isn't important or that it is. That's missing the point, society simply is, and so is the individual.  A show like Freaks and Geeks gets it right because it isn't about finding your place in society but about finding yourself. It isn't trying to boil the search for the self into one's relationship to a club.

Perhaps the most obvious real world parallel that can be drawn from Glee is to the gay rights movement. The show is clearly aimed at many in the LGBT movement (among other groups) and so is trying very hard to resonate with them. I certainly applaud this effort to create a mainstream show which deals with these issues head-on but I worry too that presenting the solution to these kids problems as inclusion in a group like Glee or a Gay-Straight Alliance, and eventually a role in a group with an agenda that stretches beyond high school.  The problem is that the formation of groups creates boundary lines. For instance, in many ways the LGBT is no longer just a fight for rights its, in many ways, a fight against the religious right.  A group can be helpful, for instance a government provides for common defense, but they can be harmful too like when they take advantage of smaller governments.  A balance has to be struck between self-interest and group-interest but that isn't easy.

And that's the whole point: life isn't easy, and high school definitely isn't easy. Telling kids to join a club or a social group, be a part of something larger than yourself probably may lead to college, and then marriage, and then a cubicle. Some people want exactly that, but what others need is something completely different. Maybe to find your way you have to get lost, strike out on your own, get made fun of, make friends and lose them, and perhaps most of all you have to become ok with not fitting in with everybody (or maybe even anybody).